The Debt 4 by Kelly Favor Read Free Book Online Page A

confusing for me.”
    “What’s so confusing?” he said softly.
    “Going home is bringing up a lot of bad
memories for me.   That’s why I
couldn’t sleep.   I’ve got a lot of
baggage in my hometown.   I ran away
because it was so bad.”
    “What was so bad?” he said, coming close
enough that she could smell his manly scent, and his cologne.   He was fresh and masculine and strong
and sexy.  
    Raven wanted to spill her guts, tell him
everything.   She wanted to tell him
about the party, about Caleb and Andre and the people who’d turned on
her—her parents, her brother, her friends—people at school.
    She wanted to tell him how she’d gotten
so lost in the end—so lost that one dark, horrible night she’d practically
swallowed a pharmacy along with half a bottle of vodka before her mother had
found her and called 911.
    But looking into his brown eyes, knowing
that he still didn’t really want to
be with her, didn’t want to be committed to her, that he was just using her for
the things that he wanted and needed from her—she couldn’t trust him
enough to tell him everything.
    “Sometime maybe I’ll tell you,” she said,
finally.   “But not tonight.”
    “Okay,” he said, and he didn’t seem angry
about it.
    “It’s just been hard.”  
    “You called home,” he said, as if he
already knew.
    He knew from just looking at her face,
probably.   Jake Novak could read her
like a book with magnified print.
    She nodded.   And then there was a lump in her throat,
and she was crying, bawling actually.
    “Hey,” he said, and then his strong arms
were wrapping around her, enfolding her in his embrace, rocking her gently as
he kissed her forehead.   “Hey, it’s
going to be okay,” he said.   “You
know that, right?”
    She couldn’t reply.   She was crying for everything—for
Jake’s pain about his dead fiancé, for the horror of what he’d been through in
the war, for Skylar being scared and maybe sick, and then finally she was
crying for her own pain.   All of the
things she’d been through when she was seventeen and none of it had turned out
okay back then.
    But now Jake Novak was holding her and
even though he kept telling her he couldn’t give her what she needed, the
strange truth was that he continued to give her exactly what she needed.
     
    ***
     
    They slept together that night in her
hotel room.
    It was all very dreamlike, the way Jake had
comforted her, then led her slowly into the bedroom and laid her down on the
mattress before taking off his shirt and jeans and climbing in beside her.
    His arms wrapped around her once more, he
hadn’t needed to say much of anything.  
    In seconds, she’d fallen
asleep—something that had seemed an impossibility just minutes before
that.
    When she awoke again, it was late at
night, more like early morning, although the sun hadn’t yet begun to rise.
    Jake was still holding her, his skin hot
against her skin, his muscular frame so smooth and exciting that she turned over
onto her back and ran her fingers along his forearm, trailing up to his bicep
and shoulder.
    He stirred a little, but his eyes never
opened, and he instinctively grabbed her and pulled her body in that much
closer.
    Raven listened to him breathe in the
quiet peaceful darkness, and felt his body against hers, and she looked at his
face and his beautiful features, trying to make sense of who he was and what
part he was playing in her life.
    She allowed herself to feel the absolute
wonder of being so close to a man that millions of women wanted and fantasized
about.   Jake Novak was the biggest
thing going (or had been until his recent video leak), and somehow, against all
odds, he’d landed smack dab in the middle of her little life and exploded the
whole thing like a megaton bomb.
    Raven studied his face and tried to
understand why he was even with her.   What had made him choose her that night at the party?   What had made him so attracted to her?
    She